Hey Gang - I'm far from what I would call a Fanuc expert: I've been to a couple of Fanuc training weeks at Rochester Hills, and have done a handful of integrations. This question is really rooted in curiosity more than anything.
Recently, I've been working on a couple of Universal Robot integrations, and I very quickly got sick of the limitations of programming it in the UR GUI on the teach pendant. Unfortunately, their offline program is only a Virtual Linux machine that runs the teach pendant software - nothing in the way of simulation, etc. And it has all the same limitations as working on the physical teach pendant in the GUI.
Because of what I saw as the lack of basic functionality in the programming (it's not possible to call a sub-program from within a sub-program, for one) I was advised by UR that the best course for more advanced programming was to do it in their base robot language of URScript, which is based in Python. I've learned enough Python to be dangerous, as well as work around some of the issues I was having with the UR GUI programming, but I found myself wondering:
Just how useful is being able to do some/any programming for a Fanuc in KAREL? I heard with the move to the R30iB controller it is now an option you have to purchase just to be able to access anyway, but I've never had a reason to even look at the KAREL programming in the past. The only time I can think of when it would be useful is when I was doing some PalletTool programming and the needs of the application were pretty far outside what PalletTool would handle out of the box.
It seems that TP programming (either on the physical Teach Pendant or in RoboGuide) is way more capable than the UR equivalent. Is it typical or expected to have to get into the KAREL programs at some point anyway? How useful is it to be able to do? Any good examples of projects that got into the KAREL programming, and why they wouldn't have worked with out it, or why it just made it easier?
Thanks all!